pending lengthy and expensive professional intervention.
Meanwhile Sabatino admired the red saloon, whistling appreciatively.
'So where did you get this?'
Gesualdo smiled.
'Friend of a friend. But what's really interesting is where he got it.'
Sabatino glanced at him, but Dario was already on his way back from putting the fear of God into the driver who had so ill-advisedly attempted to enforce the traffic regulations single-handed. Gesualdo said nothing more.
With a mighty roar, he reversed at high speed along the alley into the continuing stalemate on Via Duomo. Reaching out of the window, he turned on the blue flasher held on the roof by its magnetic base and handed the police wand to Dario.
'Wave this around a bit.'
Dario looked at him doubtfully.
'Are you sure that's a good idea?'
'Works like a charm. Just try it and see.'
'But suppose some of our friends are about. If they get the idea that you're a cop Gesualdo laughed sarcastically.
'Next time I see them, Dario, I'll let them know that you think they're dumb enough to think that if I really was a cop, I'd drive around advertising the fact.'
Dario shrugged.
'I guess you're right.'
But just before they reached Piazza Amore, Sabatino leant out of the window and grabbed the flashing light off the roof.
'Kill the wand!'
'What's up?' asked Dario.
Sabatino pointed. Locked in the grid of traffic headed the other way was a real police car, with a couple of uniforms in the front.
'All we need now is for them to start taking an interest,' murmured Gesualdo nervously.
Fortunately the policemen's view was blocked by a large orange truck in front, and they hadn't noticed the presence of their counterfeit colleagues. In fact they didn't seem to be taking much interest in anything. They hadn't even bothered to make use of their own lights and siren to carve a passage through the jam, for some reason, seemingly content to lumber along at the same speed as the common public. As well as the two uniformed officers, there was a man in civilian clothes on board, sitting all alone in the back. He seemed to be about to get out of the car, perhaps having realized that at this point it would be quicker to walk.
But as the red Jaguar passed by, the line of traffic going the other way suddenly started to move, then to pick up speed. For a moment it seemed as though some plug had been pulled, and that everything would now be easy.
Then, without any warning, the whole thing ground to a halt once again. The refuse truck stopped dead, its brake lights bathing the police car in an eerie red glare. The uniformed driver groped for the brake pedal, but he was still speaking to his colleague in the front passenger seat and hit the clutch instead. The police car slammed into the tail-gate of the truck, not fast enough to do any serious damage, although the civilian in the back went sprawling into the space behind the front seats while the two cops, who naturally hadn't bothered to buckle their seat-belts, shot forward and struck their foreheads on the windscreen and the steering wheel respectively.
The one in the passenger seat recovered first. He glanced at the driver, who had blood streaming from his nose.
'That son of a bitch!' he yelled in dialect. 'I'll squash his balls like tomatoes!'
He got out of the car and strode towards the front of the truck, some sort of municipal maintenance vehicle by the look of it. But when he was more than half-way there, the door of the cab swung open and three men in overalls jumped out and turned in a line, facing him.
What happened next is unclear. The policeman may have started to say something, but no one remembered that. All they remembered — the few who had not been looking the other way at the time, or whose view had not been blocked by another vehicle — was the gunfire, the abrupt volley of rapid, hammered shots which 'could have come from anywhere'. Almost everyone remembered the policeman falling, the gunmen sprinting away, abandoning their truck, the screams, panic and general confusion. On the other hand, no one at all seems to have noticed the man in civilian clothes struggle out of the back of the police car and run off down a narrow alley as fast as he could go, his handcuffed arms swinging stiffly from side to side.
XIV
By this time, the red Jaguar was over half a mile away.
Thanks to a judicious use of the police wand and the flashing light, which allowed him not only to disregard the rules of the road but to intimidate those similarly bent on ignoring them, Gesualdo had been able to indulge to the full his penchant for massive acceleration, emergency braking, breath-taking near-misses, controlled skids and all the other techniques associated with the chaos theory of urban driving.
None of this seemed to have improved the mood of the two men in the front of the car. The brief effervescence of male camaraderie had gone flat, leaving a thin, sour, strained silence. Both Gesualdo and Sabatino appeared to be sunk in a mood of sullen apathy, punctuated by frequent sighs, which baffled and slightly alarmed their passenger.
Maybe it was a mistake inviting myself along, thought Dario De Spino.
By now he had known the two men for almost a year, but was frequently forced to admit to himself — though not to others, for knowledge was his business — that what he didn't know about them easily outweighed what he did. He had met Sabatino first, actually tried to pick him up in a bar! It rapidly became clear that Sabati was not that way inclined, but it also became clear that he and Gesualdo liked hanging out with Dario, in a spirit of casual, bullshitting camaraderie, and that they were connected to some very big players indeed.
Exactly which players, Dario had never been able to determine exactly, although he wouldn't admit this to anyone else either. On the contrary, being seen with Gesualdo and Sabatino had upgraded his own image considerably in quarters where such enhancement can make the difference between a sweet deal and a kiss-off — or something far worse.
So it wasn't just altruism which made Dario wish to raise his companions' spirits by any possible means. The world in which he had been born and had his being was rich in portents, omens and auguries. Read them wrong and you were dead, often literally. Maybe the lads were simply suffering from indigestion, or maybe someone had, God forbid, put the evil eye on them. In either case, he needed to find out, and fast.
'So how's business with you two?' he asked a trifle too breezily. 'Personally I've been doing a little distribution work for one of the big names in the pharmaceutical sector.'
No harm in hinting that he too had powerful contacts whose identity he could not, needless to say, reveal. In fact the deal was a one-off involving a couple of kilos brought in by a friend of a friend, in both senses of the word, to be marketed through various gay discos, the discretion of whose clientele was assured.
No response.
'What a life!' he went on. 'Up at all hours, from one end of the city to the other, the phone ringing off the hook, trying to keep track of inventory, and God help you if you botch a sale! The only perk is the built-in wastage inevitable in any transportation and repackaging operation.'
Still no response. Dario leant forward between the two front seats.
'Here you go, lads. Something to lift your spirits.'
Gesualdo did not take his eyes off the road. Sabatino glanced down at the plastic sachet of crystalline white powder in Dario's outstretched palm. With a violent motion of his hand he slapped it away.
